Trends in Mobile Usage

If you’re not able to reach your audience through mobile search or display, or you’re not providing a satisfactory mobile experience you will be missing out compared to competitors who are.

Mobile-only social networks like Snapchat are also growing rapidly in popularity, and this is driving increases in time spent on mobile devices.

The majority of consumers are however, multiplatform, and will often be multi-screening, accessing sites on mobile or desktop, so consistent experiences across devices needs to be deployed.

The reality is that while mobile usage is overwhelmingly popular for some activities such as social media, messaging and catching up with news, the majority of consumers in the UK will also have a desktop computer which they will still tend to use for more detailed viewing and purchasing.

Statcounter records mobile vs tablet vs desktop usage across the UK and reports an increase in mobile usage. Mobile has grown from 28% to 37% market share in 2018, and at the same time desktop has fallen from 59% in 2016 to 51% in 2018. Tablet has seen a small decrease in market share from 12.5% in 2016 to 10.8% in 2018.

eMarketer reports that in 2018, for the first time, smartphones will be the preferred method to access the internet among adults in the UK. eMarketer expects this gap to continue to widen, predicting that daily time spent on smartphones will reach 2 hours 14 minutes by 2019 vs. 1 hour 54 minutes for desktops/laptops.

When looking specifically at the manufacturing and engineering companies that we work with we have seen an increase in customers using mobile devices. In some instances, mobile usage has increased by 93% compared with desktop usage being down by 21% year on year.

Historically, mobile was something we did as an afterthought from our desktop site designs. When desktop was the main platform, that probably made sense. But now, with anywhere between 40% to 55% of visitors coming from mobile, we can no longer treat your mobile site as a secondary priority.

But, don’t forget the desktop! Data shows that most conversions still happen there, so your desktop experience is still critical to overall business success.

If you would like to talk to us about how we can help make your existing website mobile friendly or completely redesign your website to work across multiple platforms then please get in touch with us today.